22nd
Why anime fans pirate shows
Ars Technica’s quickie on Why anime fans pirate the shows they love made me want to comment:
The reason why fans shun “official” anime is obvious: it’s the difference between American Saturday morning cartoons and anime.
Western media companies think that anime and cartoons are the same thing, with the same target audience. So when they sub (or more often dub, ugh) the few series they decide to distribute, they dumb it down and remove anything which might offend the parent of a 5 year-old.
Anime != cartoons. The best rival any adult drama for quality of writing and complexity of plot.
They are also a great way to learn about and try to understand Japanese culture. Americanizing them removes most of the value, and dumbing them down removes the rest.
So yeah, until distributors figure out that they aren’t selling these shows to kids and morons, the fans will continue to pirate them. And why not? The economy of fansubbing isn’t broken, so where is the business case for trying to fix it?
I wish all TV shows and movies were fansubbed. We’d got a lot more out of them.
